DISTRACTED BY BLINKY THINGS

Having noticed mention of Penglai (an island and a fictitious place) I ended up trying to find Gong Sunchang who "seemingly abstracted" had wandered there. Which of course sent me to a dictionary of ancient Chinese from which I only narrowly escaped.

Like any halfway neurotic person, I obsessively count things. Street people. Tykes. Dogs. Women with yoga mats. Robot taxis. Familiar faces. How many blocks I have walked.
Used pipe cleaners. Repeated wordsthat are merely filler.

And I am aware of my surroundings. Box of chocolates. An English pipe from the middle of the last century on the folding stand beneath the Peterson with the silver band I acquired last year, both recently smoked. The fact that the tea tray with other pipes is looking shockingly disorganized. The two tins of crappy tobacco I shall probably not finish in several months.
And I might just give 'em away.

Although I know that I have too many pipes (one only really needs between a dozen briars and a score), I have scant clue as to the precise count. It's immaterial. There is always one more that must be brought in, because it says something; harbour pilot, mechanical engineer during the late fifties, country doctor, snarky young man at Harvard, female working on her PHD in South East Asian ethnic studies hiding in her uncle's dusty library with a tin of Rattray's Old Gowrie, a pot of Lapsang Souchong tea, and a bottle of sherry .....
The last time I counted them was a decade ago.
It's probably around three hundred.

The seal-script words above are 此時 ('chi si') "this time", or "at this time", in somewhat archaic literary Chinese, and no longer used in the spoken language at this time.
Sorry. Couldn't resist using "at this time" at this time.

Seal script has two fairly common standardized versions but also encompasses a number of other script versions which are close relatives, but also, confusingly, will have invented forms (i.e. backformations) that never existed at that time. This is because words which did not exist when seal script was the common way of writing but whose components were known (in various combinations; left side, right, top, and bottom) were easily given a logical archaic form when that was needed. Personal names, official titles, brush calligraphy, or personal markings such as a studio, book room, or fanciful nicknames and aliases.

What this means is that there are THREE types of seal script dictionaries: those which have ONLY genuine classically used words, those which have all or much of the modern lexicon, and very complete dictionaries that show every possible variation of more words than were used in either ancient writtings or current usage (with annotations saying who and where or how). That last dictionary type is great fun.



By the way: I should think that the young lady in the library has the following in her collection of smoking equipment, of which her relatives remain unaware: a Peterson System Standard, fairly small. An elegant Dublin. A sandblasted billiard. A straightstemmed Dunhill Shell-briar.
A number of mediocre pipes bought on whims. And a taper-stemmed straight Bulldog, very sporty-looking, which no hobbit-wannabee would be caught dead with.



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